IEET News - MAY DAY! 2026
We're flooding the zone with intelligence
Emerging Technoprogressive Politicians. In their weekly chat for Technoprogressive Hub, J. Hughes and Matteo McDermant also spoke about the technoprogressive policy proposals from California Congressman and US Presidential aspirant Ro Khanna, Congressional candidate Alex Bores, and Massachusetts state legislature candidate Jason Poulos, e.g. universal basic income and services, progressive taxes, AI democratization and sovereign wealth funds. We also discussed how OpenAI is also now pushing for UBI and technoprogressive policies, while Palantir has fully embraced a techno-libertarian/authoritarian policy agenda.
Prosthetic Gods on The Curiosity Desk. J. Hughes and Nir Eisikovits appeared on WGBH's Curiosity Desk this week. Their segment starts at 2hr03m. They talked about automation job loss, OpenAI’s struggles, and the ethics of longevity research.
Platform Socialism. This week on Matteo McDermant’s IEET-supported Bread and Robots, he had a chat with James Muldoon on “Democratizing Digital Life.” They cover the core ideas behind Platform Socialism, the hidden labor that powers AI, how cities and communities are already experimenting with data sovereignty (including some surprising examples close to home in New Mexico), and why the question of platform governance is less about capital R Revolution than about the molecular, everyday politics of how our tools are designed and who they serve.
Building a Technoprogressive Social Democracy. J. Hughes spoke this week for Science, Technology and the Future on “Tech Oligarchs, AI Fascism, and the Prospect of a Technoprogressive Social Democracy.” The same technologies that enable digital authoritarianism also open pathways to a more participatory, transparent, and legitimate democracy. Drawing on experiments from Taiwan's deliberative digital platforms to liquid democracy in European pirate and populist parties, and on proposals for digital citizenship agents, automated sousveillance, and AI as a public utility, this talk argues for a technoprogressive social-democratic agenda: one that embraces algorithmic governance as more fixable than biased human institutions, democratizes access to AI through universal basic compute, and redistributes wealth to prevent plutocratic capture of these tools. The question is not whether algorithms will govern, but whether we will govern the algorithms—and that is a question of political power, not technological destiny.
Universal Abundance, Not Technofeudalism. In his Substack this week, friend of the IEET, David Shapiro, discusses the dark truth that capitalism (and previous social systems) are prone to create “permanent underclasses,” and that we have to fight now to ensure universal abundance and not AI-driven technofeudalism.
Apocalyptic Insecurity for White Collar Workers. Last week on IEET Board member RJ Eskow’s show The Zero Hour he spoke with Lynn Parramore and Alissa Quart about their article for The New Republic on “For White-Collar Workers, AI Also Stands for Apocalyptic Insecurity’”
Preparing for the Economic Singularity. IEET Board member David Wood and futurist Calum Chase are co-hosts of the London Futurists podcast. This week they spoke to Adrian Brown about “Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity.”
How to Communicate X-Risks. London Futurists also hosted a discussion this week with John Sherman, President of the AI Risk Network, Anthony Bailey, of Pause AI Global, and Hannah Betts on “Talking about catastrophic and existential risks: Dos and Don’ts.”
Speaking of communicating AI x-risks… watch the forum that Senator Bernie Sanders convened this week in Washington D.C. on “The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation”
What Does Machine Consciousness Require? Calum Chase is also co-host of the podcast Exploring Machine Consciousness. This week’s episode is an interview with philosopher Henry Shevlin discussing how our understanding of consciousness is evolving in the age of advanced AI. From philosophy and neuroscience to the rapid progress of modern language models, Henry examines whether intelligence alone is enough, or whether something deeper (like continuous experience) is required for consciousness.
Is a Data Center Moratorium Technoprogressive? Check out Holly Buck’s essay in Jacobin, “Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution,” on why the Left should focus on democratizing AI instead of fighting AI data center buildouts. It provides a nice complement to our discussion on Technoprogressive Hub of the need to redirect the AI data center fight to focus on the need for a Green and modernized energy infrastructure.
Metamodernism. IEET Board member PJ Manney is co-host with Laura Faye Tenenbaum of the podcast Love Letters to the Future. This week they spoke with Greg Dember about “metamodernism” and its relationship to modernism and postmodernism.
The Coming Re-Set. For the Singularity Weblog, friend of the IEET Nikola Danaylov just interviewed futurist Peter Leyden about his forthcoming book The Great Progression. Civilization is in the midst of a reset driven by AI, clean energy, and bioengineering.
AI and Postcapitalism. Check out Paul Mason’s new paper “Postcapitalism and Agentic Artificial Intelligence.” Generative AI makes the transition to a post-capitalist economic system easier and likely sooner. Following any financial market crash produced by the mismatch of hyperscaler revenue and valuations, civil society should reshape the technology and use it to progress towards a system characterized by low hours of necessary work, high leisure time and large-scale mutual ownership of goods, beginning with information goods. .
Upcoming Events
May 21 - 22, 2026
Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science (GETS) Conference
Phoenix, AZ USA
Matteo McDermant will be speaking on “The Technoprogressive City: Municipal Strategies for Building Digital Democracy” as part of GETS 2026. https://events.asucollegeoflaw.com/gets/schedule/
May 30, 2026 8pm
Live Taping of an episode of Prosthetic Gods at Long Now Boston
The Foundry, Cambridge, MA USA
J. Hughes and Nir Eisikovits will tape another live session of Prosthetic Gods on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risks” as part of a Long Now Boston event. Register here: https://www.longnowboston.org/events/eisikovits-hughes-2026
June 5-6, 2026
The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces
Campus Center, UMass Boston, Boston, MA USA
Co-sponsored by the IEET and the Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston. Panelists and keynote speakers will present their work on medical applications of BCIs, the military uses of neurotechnology, and proper governance of this emerging technology. As BCIs connect brains to computers, and allow direct communication between brains, they raise fascinating philosophical questions about consciousness, cognition, and selfhood. Can consciousness be distributed across different brains? Is collective cognition possible? What implications would distributed consciousness and collective cognition have for one’s sense of self and personal identity? BCIs also raise deep ethical questions. Might BCIs raise novel privacy concerns through the direct access of information in an individual’s brain? Would BCI neuroenhancements that relieve an individual of some cognitive function prevent them developing certain moral and intellectual virtues? Join us at The Philosophy of Brain-Computer Interfaces for discussion of these and other critical issues arising from the rapidly developing area of neurotechnology. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-philosophy-of-brain-computer-interfaces-tickets-1983422685645
June 11-12, 2026
Existential Threats and Other Disasters: Novel (Bio)ethical Solutions for Novel Challenges
Paris, France
J. Hughes will be speaking on “Global Citizenship: New World DisOrder and the Moral Case for Post-Nationalism” at this conference organized by The Center for the Study of Bioethics, The Hastings Center for Bioethics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Centre for Bioethics, and The Master of Bioethics Program of Columbia University. Register here: https://www.thehastingscenter.org/hastings-center-event/existential-threats-and-other-disasters-novel-bioethical-solutions-for-novel-challenges/
June 20-August 20, 2026
IEET Summer Course on Technoprogressive Worldbuilding
Online
Instructor: Matteo MacDermant, TA: James Hughes
Format: Weekly 90–120 minute seminar + 60 minute cohort studio
September 19-20, 2026
The Technoprogressive Opportunity
London, UK
Join us in London in September to chart a global technoprogressive policy agenda. Jointly hosted by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and the London Futurists. Free to attend. Speakers will be announced shortly, but RSVPs are already open at https://www.meetup.com/london-futurists/events/314148857/